Tanglos, preventing filament tangles

thingiverse

I've had a couple of cases where I got tangles (knots) in my filament. This is really bad because you might not discover it for many hours of printing, but eventually it'll catch up to you and ruin your print. Tangles are guaranteed not to happen as long as the end of your filament is secure and you don't let go of it. Unfortunately, sometimes the end of the filament breaks, as happened to me, and then when you try to reconnect it to the printer, you can't be sure whether it's gotten tangled in the spool and created a knot that you might discover a month from now. This is why I developed Tanglos. It's a little cylinder that you put on your filament. (Fill the hole in Tanglos with [4mm PTFE tube](http://amzn.to/2tuMLzz) first.) When printing normally, the filament goes through Tanglos happily. If your filament happened to break at any point between Tanglos and the printer, Tanglos will usually hold on to the loose end of filament, making it cumbersome and heavy, and mostly preventing it getting tangled in your spool. I gave Tanglos a helix wall just for fun :)